7

Though the weather station predicted more snow all during the first week of January, it held off for two days. Humphrey Stalladge opened up again, working the entire long bar by himself-Annie and Anni, off in the country, were still snowed in-and found business as lively as he had predicted. He put in long days, working sixteen or seventeen hours, and when his wife came in to make hamburgers, he said to her, "Okay. The roads finally get plowed enough so guys can get their cars moving again, and the first place they head to is a bar. Where they stay all day long. Does that make sense to you?"

"You called it," was all she'd say.

"It's good drinking weather, anyhow," Humphrey said.

Good drinking weather? More than that: Don Wanderley, driving with Peter Barnes to the Hawthorne house, thought that this dark gray day, still punishingly cold, was like the weather inside a drunk's mind. It had none of the uncanny flashes of brightness he had seen in Milburn earlier in the winter: no doorposts or chimneys gleamed, no sudden colors jumped forward. There were none of these magician's tricks. Everything that was not white was blurry in the gray clinging weather; with no true shadows and a hidden sun, everything looked heavily shadowed.

He glanced over his shoulder at the rolled-up parcel on the back seat. His poor weapons, found in Edward's house. They were almost childishly crude. Now that he had a plan and the three of them were going to fight, even the depressive weather seemed to imply their defeat. He and a tense seventeen-year-old boy and an old man with a bad cold: for a moment it seemed comically hopeless. But without them, hope did not exist.

"The deputy doesn't plow as good as Omar," Peter said beside him. It was merely to interrupt the silence, but Don nodded: the boy was right. The deputy had trouble holding the plow at a steady level, and when he was through with a street it had an oddly terraced look. The three-and four-inch variations in the road made the car jounce like a fairground trolley. On either side of the street they could see mailboxes tilted crazily into the snowbanks-Churchill had skittled them with the edge of the plow.

"This time we're going to do something," the boy said, making it half a question.

"We're going to try," Don said, glancing at the boy. Peter looked like a young soldier who'd seen a dozen firelights in two weeks-looking at him, you could taste the bitterness of spent adrenalin.

"I'm ready," he said, and while Don heard the firmness in it he also heard ragged nerves and wondered if the boy, who had done so much more than he and Ricky Hawthorne, could endure any more.

"Wait until you hear what I have in mind," Don said. "You might not want to go through with it. And that would be okay, Peter. I'd understand."

"I'm ready," the boy repeated, and Don could feel him shivering. "What are we going to do?"

"Go back into Anna Mostyn's house," he answered. "I'll explain it at Ricky's."

Peter slowly exhaled. "I'm still ready."